Apollo's Lyre

On this way, they reached the roof. Christine tripped over it as
lightly as a swallow. Their eyes swept the empty space between the
three domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed freely over
Paris, the whole valley of which was seen at work below. She called
Raoul to come quite close to her and they walked side by side along the
zinc streets, in the leaden avenues; they looked at their twin shapes
in the huge tanks, full of stagnant water, where, in the hot weather,
the little boys of the ballet, a score or so, learn to swim and dive.

The shadow had followed behind them clinging to their steps; and the
two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down,
trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great
bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky.

It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received
their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted
slowly by; and Christine said to Raoul: "Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the
world, and then you will leave me, Raoul. But, if, when the moment
comes for you to take me away, I refuse to go with you--well you must
carry me off by force!"

"Are you afraid that you will change your mind, Christine?"

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head in an odd fashion. "He is a
demon!" And she shivered and nestled in his arms with a moan. "I am
afraid now of going back to live with him ... in the ground!"